On a typical day, I would stay really busy all day and before I knew, it was lunch time, then after lunch, it was time go home. I worked a shift of 8-5, which I thought wasn’t going to be fun but I actually prefer it over working nights or later day shifts now. I only lived ten minutes from work, so I wouldn’t have to wake up very early to get there on time, but I was good about getting there on time.

When I got there, I would immediately check my e-mail to see if there were any new issues that I knew about. After checking my e-mail, I would go and check the Extranet, which is what they used for their clients to post problems they were having or changes that they wanted for their websites. On regular days I would always have at least two new assignments that I would be working on.

Susquehanna Technologies, or SusQtech, had a development, dev, environment and a live environment setup for all of their clients. This made it easier to make changes and test the changes before putting the changes on the live server, or pushing them live. I was familiar with this with my old employer, because its bad practice to work on a live site and test changes on a live site, so we would always work on a different server when we were making changes, then put them on the live server when we were satisfied. I was pleased to see it was the same way at SusQtech. I would terminal service, or remote desktop, into the development server, which was usually running windows 2000 or windows 2003 and bring up the project in Visual Studio 2003. Here I would make the necessary changes such as change what information we collect from a user when they register or just change the text a user sees after they log in. Sometimes these were simple changes that took only a few minutes, sometimes they were much harder changes that I would have to ask someone else in the office for help. After I made the changes, I would write it down on my timesheet for the week since we had to log all of our hours and then move on to the next assignment.

Some days I would get a lot of assignments, other days I might not receive any. I also had big projects that I would work on during idle time, to give me something to do while I was waiting for more assignments. Whatever free time I had, I would start working on the big projects again or just cleanup the code that I was working on for something else. We received an hour for lunch, which would give me enough time to go out and get something to eat and relax a little bit so that I wasn’t burnt out by the end of the day. After lunch, if I wasn’t currently working on something, I would check my e-mail again as well as the extranet and make sure there wasn’t anything else that I should be working on.

By the end of the day, you want to have everything checked-in, which means that anyone can edit it in Visual Studio 2003, if you have a file checked-out, no one else is allowed access to it, so if something happens later that day and they need to change something, they can go change it without having to get you involved, so I would make sure that everything that was currently in use worked fine before I left each day and checked in these versions. If it was for something I was developing on the side that wasn’t currently a part of the site, I could leave it checked out or leave it so it may not be working properly, but as long as the project compiled fine and it didn’t cause problems with the working parts of the project, it wouldn’t be a problem. Some days I had to stay a little later if a big problem occurred right before 5, but most days I was able to leave on time or right after 5.